OnLive Cloud Gaming

OnLive works like a streaming movie service, except the movies are games and you can control them as if you were playing on your own PC or console. To get connected, you sign up for a (free) account, buy an OnLive “microconsole” or install the (free) OnLive application to your PC or Mac, and start playing. On the PC the whole process took about ten minutes. The microconsole was simple to set up too, but unfortunately refused to connect to OnLive (“error a511″) so I wasn’t able to test it.

The OnLive Microconsole and Controller

As a streaming service however, OnLive is of course sensitive to bandwidth and latency. They recommend a 5Mbit per second wired connection as the minimum for a decent experience, and I would concur. My ADSL runs at about 6.5Mb/sec, but even so the OnLive application complained about the speed and refused to connect at times. My Wi-Fi didn’t really cut it either, and in fact the microconsole hardware doesn’t support wireless connections at all. That’s something to consider if you’re thinking of a living room installation.

OnLive Dashboard

OnLive Marketplace

Around 150 games – big studio and indie – are available and most have no-install free trials you can start playing pretty much instantly, which is a very nice feature. Also nice is that it takes only a few seconds from choosing a game on the OnLive dashboard to starting playing it. The whole dashboard experience is slick and works well, and each game saves your progress and preferences in the OnLive cloud so you can pick up where you left off from wherever you access the service.

Individual titles can be purchased outright, or you can buy subscriptions to a range of games over a time period. For example, BT is offering its broadband subscribers an exclusive opportunity to get the OnLive PlayPack Bundle free for three months when they sign-up before January 31 2012.

So how does it play? I’ll admit, I was dubious when I first heard about OnLive last year. “Games? Over the internet? Can’t be done!”, I thought. The truth is that it works surprisingly well, but not perfectly so.

OnLive: Space Marine

The games I tested were responsive and play more or less as if they were running locally. Sound and control are fine, but graphics are degraded, looking soft and compressed compared to locally rendered versions, especially when there was lots of movement on the screen. I had some trouble spotting enemies in the background when playing Space Marine for example, despite playing up close on a 23″ 1680×1050 display.

I am at the lower limit of required connection speed though, and I’d expect the graphical fidelity to improve with available bandwidth. OnLive games may well look acceptable with a better link and/or when viewed at console-TV distance.

OnLive: FEAR 3

The other issue I had was a certain laggy jerkiness of mouse control, but this was slight and only noticeable with particular games (looking at you, FEAR 3). Again, this is something that might improve with a better internet connection.

OnLive’s ace in the hole though is that it looks and plays the same no matter what hardware you’re running it on. I have a fairly powerful gaming PC (Intel Core i7-2600K + Nvidia GTX460 1Gb), but I was able to play OnLive games equally well on the gaming rig and Intel HD3000 and Intel Atom powered machines (both very much not gaming rigs).

Orcs Must Die: OnLive

Orcs Must Die: Local

Orcs Must Die: Comparison

Running the games locally would have been impossible on the less powerful machines. For example, Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die (a fine game, but hardly a gfx card breaker) installed on the Atom N450 powered netbook was unplayable, running at (est.) 5fps with most of the graphics missing. Under OnLive it played perfectly.

Orcs Must Die: Atom N450

Orcs Must Die: OnLive

I could also have played these games on my Mac and some are also playable on Android touch devices, even though native versions are not available for those platforms. With OnLive, hardware doesn’t matter.

Cloud gaming is here, but who’s going to buy it? I can’t see OnLive converting many hardcore gamers; they will already possess machines capable of delivering a better looking experience locally, OnLive response times and framerates are lower and some top titles are still missing from the catalogue (Modern Warfare, Battlefield). It’s also not going to attract mobile gamers because of the bandwidth requirements. However, for the more casual home gamer, who perhaps doesn’t want to invest in a powerful PC or console, or risk a lot of money on a single game, OnLive does have a lot to offer. So long as they’ve got a fast and reliable internet connection.

To summarise:

Pros:

• Easy to set up
• Low hardware requirements
• Good selection of games
• Games available on platforms without native versions
• Free trials for most games
• Quick start, no installs
• Works

vs. Cons:

• Needs a fast internet connection
• Degraded graphics
• Some big titles missing
• Some games have control niggles

OnLive is an innovative service that does work and I’m sure will find a market.

OnLive  is available in the UK now and you can create an account and start playing for free by visiting http://www.onlive.co.uk

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The main hall was like an 80's arcade

Walking in to the darkened main hall on Saturday afternoon,  we were greeted by a wall of heat and arcade sounds, just like walking into a vast 1980′s arcade.

Geoff defeats Donkey Kong

Down one wall was a line of original arcade cabinets with such classics as R-Type, Donkey Kong, Robotron and Operation Wolf, as well as some more obscure Japanese titles I’d never heard of. On the other side was pinball alley, lined with pinball machines and incorporating a “Pinball Through The Ages” mini exhibition in a side room. So far, so good.

The main floor was split between modern and classic.

X360s and PS3s were being used for various EGL competitions on the latest games (sorry, I didn’t pay much attention to this part and never actually found some of the competition rooms) and giving early access to Modern Warfare 3 a few days before the official release. There was a Kinect space, a two day Rock Band marathon challenge and a round table filled with XBox were running FFA Halo that you could drop in and out of as you wished.

Retro Tournament: Waggle-O-Thon and Sensi

On the retro side, row upon row of tables were lined with computers and consoles from the 80′s and 90′s. All the micros you’d remember were well represented, and some you probably wouldn’t remember too. A side hall held the Retro Tournament featuring competitive play on Sensible Soccer, Street Fighter 2 and more.

Commerically, Team 17 and Llamasoft had a stand demoing their games and handing out merchandise, and a couple of stalls along the back were selling gear from RetroGT, Attic Bug and Console Passion. AmigaKit, Individual Computers, Fignition and many more were represented in a traders’ hall outside. The Steel Series and Kick Energy girls were doing their bit too.

A number of talks from past and present industry figures were held outside the main hall, away from the noise. A Look Back at Newsfield, publishers of Crash and Zzap64; The Rise & Fall of Imagine Software;  The Golden Age of Blackpool’s Arcades. There were others, but to be honest the schedule was hard to come by and I missed them.

R-Type on the Big Screen

So. Many. Highlights.

NeoGeo and MAME games played on a huge projection screen made me want to build a MAME box for the living room. Seeing Dingo for sale and meeting @Sokurah after beta testing it. Meeting the legend that is Jeff Minter and a couple more that I only knew off forums. Playing once again the arcade cabinets from the caravan park where I spent a lot of my childhood holidays, revisiting Grandstand Scramble and Astro Wars, and finally getting to play Starfox on the SNES. Getting to use a 1Ghz PPC AmigaOne (I think) and seeing Amiga OS4.0 in the flesh. Talking to Jens Schoenfeld about his Chameleon multi-emulator cartridge. Talking to the lovely Fignition people about their desire to get programming back into schools (a view I share). Seeing an actual cosplay competition. The crossing of lines at the charity party after the show on Saturday that we will never speak of again.

Click for more of my photos of Replay Expo 2011.

I suck at games. Even old ones.

It was also reinforced that I do, truly, suck at video games. I managed to score zero on Space Panic, for example, and got nowhere near the high score tables on anything. Perhaps if I built that living room MAME console … next year, Replay, next year.

Replay Expo 2011 was, in short, in the parlance, tEh aWes0m3.

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Repairing the FDI-1 was quite easy; connecting it to a modern computer not so much. So, rather than risk damaging either my expensive workstation or the ancient drive itself (irreplaceable as it uses a custom ASIC that only Amstrad made), I opted to use a KryoFlux board as a relatively safe way to handle the rescue operation.

KryoFlux Floppy Controller

“What’s a filocrutch?”, I hear you ask.

KryoFlux is a USB-based floppy controller designed for generating the lowest possible level reads of various types of floppy disks. It is capable of recording the very magnetic flux transitions that encode the data on a disk and saving them to files for later examination. The Software Preservation Society, who developed the KryoFlux board, uses these files to perfectly preserve classic software before it disappears forever from the ever-degrading magnetic media on which it is stored.

Connection was simple (USB in one end, floppy cable in the other) and I successfully made dumps of a few disks. The problem then was  how to get these into a format that would be recognised by an Amstrad CPC emulator.

Enter the hex editor. And some coffee. And less sleep than I really needed.

Just like those good ol’ days.

After a little investigation, I hacked together a Java program to convert KryoFlux “i4″ (IBM System 34 MFM) format dump files files to the more usable Amstrad DSK format. Grab the source code if you like.

A pack disk from some dodgy CPC cracker crew

The program is a basic implementation and can only cope with single sided, 40 track i4 format dump files that use non-interleaved AMSDOS standard DATA or SYSTEM sector layout. That, however, is good enough for my purposes.

A more advanced converter, based on the KryoFlux “i2″ dump format and that can convert most copy protected disks (weak bit or bitcell size based schemes excepted)  should be possible. But I’ll leave all that as an exercise for you, dear reader.

I’m off to convert that bag of disks. Do let me know how you get on.

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I purchased 2 x 4Gb DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) SO-DIMM Kit (Corsair Value Select VS8GSDSKIT800D2) and installed them in place of the previous 2 x 2Gb units. The machine booted first time perfectly happily with 8Gb RAM in use. Success!

Mid 2009 MacBook with 8Gb RAM

I’d also read that some machines would boot with this much memory but suffer a performance decrease, so I took the precaution of taking benchmarks before and after the upgrade. Fortunately, these benchmarks actually showed a decent performance gain of around 8% overall.

The key, it seems, is to have the correct version of the Boot ROM and SMC firmware.

As shown above, my machine is running version MB52.0088.B06 and 1.38f5 respectively – which can be downloaded for free from the Apple Support site.

This little hack worked well for me, but as ever with these things, your mileage may vary. I don’t know if there are specific (unlabeled) revisions of the hardware that will or won’t support this much memory, or support it but suffer performance degradation or other problems. Caveat Reader.

However, I can confirm it is actually possible for at least one MacBook. 

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“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

Well, something like that.

I retired my Amiga A1200 to the attic today.

Amiga in the Attic

It was decommissioned after a home-office reorganisation a few months ago and never plugged back in again. On reflection, it’s been a couple of years since I actually used it or really even checked in to an Amiga forum.

Things change. My ever more limited free time is being put into iOS these days. It’s been a fun ride and I’ve made some friends along the way, but it’s time to move on.

For now at least

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Now, thanks to some prodding from Heavy Stylus and clever hackery-pokery by musashi5150, a CD32 version is at last available. It doesn’t quite measure up to the improvements promised for the non-existent official release (it’s a conversion of the regular floppy version), and there is still some work to do, but it does at least (a) work, and (b) exist.

Uridium 2 CD32

For all the Uridium 2 CD32 details and downloads, head over to RGCD.

Regular Amiga users may be interested in my WHDLoad patch for Uridium 2, which fixes compatibility bugs and installs and runs the game from hard drive.

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And it really is State of the Art. It’s a remake of Spaceball’s famous Amiga demo “State of the Art“. On a VIC-20. Unbelievable!

Somehow, the developers have recreated the effects produced on the much more powerful Amiga hardware on the humble VIC-20. No custom chips, no 16-bit processors. Just a 6502 and a VIC-1, and an awful lot of clever coding.

Watch this video on YouTube.

OK, so maybe it’s not quite as smooth as the Amiga version. But still, wow, simply wow.

If you’d told me this yesterday I’d have said you were a fool, but things are different today. VIC-20: State Of The Art is an unbelievable creation!

Update: This is, of course, a complete April Fools fabrication. The video is from an A500 running the original State of the Art demo that has been processed through ffmpeg, ImageMagick and VirtualDub to produce the 12fps, low resolution, 8 colour version you see above. The music gives it away; there’s no way a VIC-20 would be capable of playing the soundtrack on the video (go on, prove me wrong!). I’d originally intended to replace the original mod (Condom Corruption by Travolta) with a chiptune’d up version, but alas didn’t have the time.

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In fact, to my moderate shame, I recall struggling to implement some of these effects at a decent speed on a 32-bit 14Mhz Amiga 1200 with all it’s custom hardware, never mind an 8-bit 4Mhz Amstrad CPC.

Do yourself a favour, and make ten minutes to watch Batman Forever.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Thanks to Markus for capturing the demo as it should be viewed, running on a real CPC.

Batman Forever was created by The Batman Group. If you can’t watch it on a real CPC, download it from pouet.net or watch it online in the CPCInAJar emulator.

Demos like this, and new games such as the R-Type remake, prove there’s life in Lord Sugar’s old dog yet!

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My friend, fellow Norn Irelander, and Team Lard cyclist, Norwin, is currently on holiday in Japan and was in Tokyo itself when the main earthquake hit. He’s been interviewed once or twice for the Belfast Telegraph and Radio Ulster, as well as recording his experiences of the quake and life afterwards on his blog Destroy All Onions.

And he’s been doing a good job of cutting through some of the “apocalyptic headlines” we see in some of the papers here.

Someone told us that the background radiation in Tokyo was ‘about a banana‘, which was hilarious, and puts so much of the media scaremongering into focus.

I joked that I saw people ‘panic buying’ books and CDs, and picking up their dry cleaning … there’s no air of disaster, people are going about doing the normal things

Though, more worringly:

Pot Noodles have sold out.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to listen to the entire interview:

Norwin is due to be in Japan for another couple of weeks. Follow his updates on Destroy All Onions, and also check out the blogs of Marty and Karen, two Norn Iron ex-pats who have been living in Tokyo for a number of years.

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Outcasts Daniel Mays, Hermione Norris and Ashley Walters

Set in the not too distant future, it told (or started to tell) the tale of some 70,000 survivors of a devastated Earth living on an alien planet they know as Carpathia. Their main (only?) settlement of Forthaven is generally peaceful, but there are hidden divisions, political tensions and secret histories that come to light, as well as more than a few mysteries of alien origin.

Outcasts had a big-name cast, decent budget and talented writers, and was aimed at a larger “mainstream” audience, but none of these managed to save it from being another one-series-wonder.

The show had its problems, which the writers acknowledge, but it was improving as it went on and, I’m sure, the shortcomings would have been addressed had it been given a second season. But no, ratings are king, and Outcasts failed to make the quota from the outset.

So another short-lived sci-fi for grown-ups series joins the BBC’s back catalogue. I’m disappointed, and a little bit bitter, but I can’t say that I’m surprised.

Should I instead be grateful for whatever sci-fi crumbs the BBC can afford to toss my way? Should I be hopeful that lessons will be learned and a new, improved, longer running grown-up sci-fi series will spring from Outcasts’ ashes? I could try, I guess.

In the meantime, it’s back to Stargate Universe.

Oh, wait.

Damn.

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